It takes creative folks to come up with the adventures that we read and get lost in on the webpages of our favourite comic books.

So it's no surprise that the same creativity has resulted in a brand-new wave of comic books which could never even see the published page.

Digital comics (sometimes called webcomics) are the wave of the future for those of us who love reading comic books but how does one turn a profit from what's essentially a free online comic novel.

For decades the mainstream comics businesses that many of us are very familiar with (thanks to a ton of big-budget movies such as the Batman and X-Men franchises) have endured by selling their various titles through selected retailers and comic stores.

Now though, for the very first time in history, it has become possible for the independent cartoonist to make (from begin to complete ) their own names and then distribute those names to a worldwide audience.

The internet has also nearly completely removed the large barrier to entry to the marketplace because of the widespread affordability and accessibility of online access.

Anyone with a pencil, a computer, a scanner and an online connection can now publish their own online comic book. Regrettably, this has also resulted in new challenges for the founders of those online titles.

One of the clearest challenges is how many of their fellow cartoonists are making their webcomics offered for free so trying to sell your own titles online becomes a very clear challenge.

Why would readers pay for what they could get elsewhere absolutely free?

And that's where the imagination of those independent online comic book publishers has bubbled to the surface.

Instead of trying to market their virtual comics to the masses that would have little knowledge of who the writer is, they have instead developed a free access version that allows them to showcase their amazing artwork and stories and establish a connection between the viewers and the characters that they've created.

The result is that the reader becomes more endeared into the figures as well as the webcomic founder monetizes this relationship by providing merchandise like T-shirts, mugs, buttons, original artwork and yesprinted copies of the free online comic.